OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Optimizing Mario Adventures in a Constrained Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

This project proposes and compares a new way to optimise Super Mario Bros. (SMB) environment where the control is in hand of two approaches, namely, Genetic Algorithm (MarioGA) and NeuroEvolution (MarioNE). Not only we learn playing SMB using these techniques, but also optimise it with constrains of collection of coins and finishing levels. Firstly, we formalise the SMB agent to maximize the total value of collected coins (reward) and maximising the total distance traveled (reward) in order to finish the level faster (time penalty) for both the algorithms. Secondly, we study MarioGA and its evaluation function (fitness criteria) including its representation methods, crossover used, mutation operator formalism, selection method used, MarioGA loop, and few other parameters. Thirdly, MarioNE is applied on SMB where a population of ANNs with random weights is generated, and these networks control Marios actions in the game. Fourth, SMB is further constrained to complete the task within the specified time, rebirths (deaths) within the limit, and performs actions or moves within the maximum allowed moves, while seeking to maximize the total coin value collected. This ensures an efficient way of finishing SMB levels. Finally, we provide a fivefold comparative analysis by plotting fitness plots, ability to finish different levels of world 1, and domain adaptation (transfer learning) of the trained models.
Dynamic Syntax Mapping: A New Approach to Unsupervised Syntax Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The intricate hierarchical structure of syntax is fundamental to the intricate and systematic nature of human language. This study investigates the premise that language models, specifically their attention distributions, can encapsulate syntactic dependencies. We introduce Dynamic Syntax Mapping (DSM), an innovative approach for the agnostic induction of these structures. Our method diverges from traditional syntax models which rely on predefined annotation schemata. Instead, we focus on a core characteristic inherent in dependency relations: syntactic substitutability. This concept refers to the interchangeability of words within the same syntactic category at either end of a dependency. By leveraging this property, we generate a collection of syntactically invariant sentences, which serve as the foundation for our parsing framework. Our findings reveal that the use of an increasing array of substitutions notably enhances parsing precision on natural language data. Specifically, in the context of long-distance subject-verb agreement, DSM exhibits a remarkable advancement over prior methodologies. Furthermore, DSM's adaptability is demonstrated through its successful application in varied parsing scenarios, underscoring its broad applicability.
Bridging AI and Clinical Practice: Integrating Automated Sleep Scoring Algorithm with Uncertainty-Guided Physician Review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Purpose: This study aims to enhance the clinical use of automated sleep-scoring algorithms by incorporating an uncertainty estimation approach to efficiently assist clinicians in the manual review of predicted hypnograms, a necessity due to the notable inter-scorer variability inherent in polysomnography (PSG) databases. Our efforts target the extent of review required to achieve predefined agreement levels, examining both in-domain and out-of-domain data, and considering subjects diagnoses. Patients and methods: Total of 19578 PSGs from 13 open-access databases were used to train U-Sleep, a state-of-the-art sleep-scoring algorithm. We leveraged a comprehensive clinical database of additional 8832 PSGs, covering a full spectrum of ages and sleep-disorders, to refine the U-Sleep, and to evaluate different uncertainty-quantification approaches, including our novel confidence network. The ID data consisted of PSGs scored by over 50 physicians, and the two OOD sets comprised recordings each scored by a unique senior physician. Results: U-Sleep demonstrated robust performance, with Cohen's kappa (K) at 76.2% on ID and 73.8-78.8% on OOD data. The confidence network excelled at identifying uncertain predictions, achieving AUROC scores of 85.7% on ID and 82.5-85.6% on OOD data. Independently of sleep-disorder status, statistical evaluations revealed significant differences in confidence scores between aligning vs discording predictions, and significant correlations of confidence scores with classification performance metrics. To achieve K of at least 90% with physician intervention, examining less than 29.0% of uncertain epochs was required, substantially reducing physicians workload, and facilitating near-perfect agreement.
The Impact of Cloaking Digital Footprints on User Privacy and Personalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Our online lives generate a wealth of behavioral records -'digital footprints'- which are stored and leveraged by technology platforms. This data can be used to create value for users by personalizing services. At the same time, however, it also poses a threat to people's privacy by offering a highly intimate window into their private traits (e.g., their personality, political ideology, sexual orientation). Prior work has proposed a potential remedy: The cloaking of users' footprints. That is, platforms could allow users to hide portions of their digital footprints from predictive algorithms to avoid undesired inferences. While such an approach has been shown to offer privacy protection in the moment, there are two open questions. First, it remains unclear how well cloaking performs over time. As people constantly leave new digital footprints, the algorithm might regain the ability to predict previously cloaked traits. Second, cloaking digital footprints to avoid one undesirable inference may degrade the performance of models for other, desirable inferences (e.g., those driving desired personalized content). In the light of these research gaps, our contributions are twofold: 1) We propose a novel cloaking strategy that conceals 'metafeatures' (automatically generated higher-level categories) and compares its effectiveness against existing cloaking approaches, and 2) we test the spill-over effects of cloaking one trait on the accuracy of inferences on other traits. A key finding is that the effectiveness of cloaking degrades over times, but the rate at which it degrades is significantly smaller when cloaking metafeatures rather than individual footprints. In addition, our findings reveal the expected trade-off between privacy and personalization: Cloaking an undesired trait also partially conceals other desirable traits.
SODA: Protecting Proprietary Information in On-Device Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The growth of low-end hardware has led to a proliferation of machine learning-based services in edge applications. These applications gather contextual information about users and provide some services, such as personalized offers, through a machine learning (ML) model. A growing practice has been to deploy such ML models on the user's device to reduce latency, maintain user privacy, and minimize continuous reliance on a centralized source. However, deploying ML models on the user's edge device can leak proprietary information about the service provider. In this work, we investigate on-device ML models that are used to provide mobile services and demonstrate how simple attacks can leak proprietary information of the service provider. We show that different adversaries can easily exploit such models to maximize their profit and accomplish content theft. Motivated by the need to thwart such attacks, we present an end-to-end framework, SODA, for deploying and serving on edge devices while defending against adversarial usage. Our results demonstrate that SODA can detect adversarial usage with 89% accuracy in less than 50 queries with minimal impact on service performance, latency, and storage.
The State of Documentation Practices of Third-party Machine Learning Models and Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Model stores offer third-party ML models and datasets for easy project integration, minimizing coding efforts. One might hope to find detailed specifications of these models and datasets in the documentation, leveraging documentation standards such as model and dataset cards. In this study, we use statistical analysis and hybrid card sorting to assess the state of the practice of documenting model cards and dataset cards in one of the largest model stores in use today--Hugging Face (HF). Our findings show that only 21,902 models (39.62\%) and 1,925 datasets (28.48\%) have documentation. Furthermore, we observe inconsistency in ethics and transparency-related documentation for ML models and datasets.
Optimal In-Place Compaction of Sliding Cubes
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2023
Year: 2023

The sliding cubes model is a well-established theoretical framework that supports the analysis of reconfiguration algorithms for modular robots consisting of face-connected cubes. The best algorithm currently known for the reconfiguration problem, by Abel and Kominers [arXiv, 2011], uses O(n3) moves to transform any n-cube configuration into any other n-cube configuration. As is common in the literature, this algorithm reconfigures the input into an intermediate canonical shape. In this paper we present an in-place algorithm that reconfigures any n-cube configuration into a compact canonical shape using a number of moves proportional to the sum of coordinates of the input cubes. This result is asymptotically optimal. Furthermore, our algorithm directly extends to dimensions higher than three.
EGAIN: Extended GAn INversion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have witnessed significant advances in recent years, generating increasingly higher quality images, which are non-distinguishable from real ones. Recent GANs have proven to encode features in a disentangled latent space, enabling precise control over various semantic attributes of the generated facial images such as pose, illumination, or gender. GAN inversion, which is projecting images into the latent space of a GAN, opens the door for the manipulation of facial semantics of real face images. This is useful for numerous applications such as evaluating the performance of face recognition systems. In this work, EGAIN, an architecture for constructing GAN inversion models, is presented. This architecture explicitly addresses some of the shortcomings in previous GAN inversion models. A specific model with the same name, egain, based on this architecture is also proposed, demonstrating superior reconstruction quality over state-of-the-art models, and illustrating the validity of the EGAIN architecture.
Automatic Tooth Arrangement with Joint Features of Point and Mesh Representations via Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Tooth arrangement is a crucial step in orthodontics treatment, in which aligning teeth could improve overall well-being, enhance facial aesthetics, and boost self-confidence. To improve the efficiency of tooth arrangement and minimize errors associated with unreasonable designs by inexperienced practitioners, some deep learning-based tooth arrangement methods have been proposed. Currently, most existing approaches employ MLPs to model the nonlinear relationship between tooth features and transformation matrices to achieve tooth arrangement automatically. However, the limited datasets (which to our knowledge, have not been made public) collected from clinical practice constrain the applicability of existing methods, making them inadequate for addressing diverse malocclusion issues. To address this challenge, we propose a general tooth arrangement neural network based on the diffusion probabilistic model. Conditioned on the features extracted from the dental model, the diffusion probabilistic model can learn the distribution of teeth transformation matrices from malocclusion to normal occlusion by gradually denoising from a random variable, thus more adeptly managing real orthodontic data. To take full advantage of effective features, we exploit both mesh and point cloud representations by designing different encoding networks to extract the tooth (local) and jaw (global) features, respectively. In addition to traditional metrics ADD, PA-ADD, CSA, and ME_{rot}, we propose a new evaluation metric based on dental arch curves to judge whether the generated teeth meet the individual normal occlusion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art tooth alignment results and satisfactory occlusal relationships between dental arches. We will publish the code and dataset.
Networks of Classical Conditioning Gates and Their Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Chemical AI is chemically synthesized artificial intelligence that has the ability of learning in addition to information processing. A research project on chemical AI, called the Molecular Cybernetics Project, was launched in Japan in 2021 with the goal of creating a molecular machine that can learn a type of conditioned reflex through the process called classical conditioning. If the project succeeds in developing such a molecular machine, the next step would be to configure a network of such machines to realize more complex functions. With this motivation, this paper develops a method for learning a desired function in the network of nodes each of which can implement classical conditioning. First, we present a model of classical conditioning, which is called here a classical conditioning gate. We then propose a learning algorithm for the network of classical conditioning gates.
Cycle-Consistency Learning for Captioning and Grounding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present that visual grounding and image captioning, which perform as two mutually inverse processes, can be bridged together for collaborative training by careful designs. By consolidating this idea, we introduce CyCo, a cyclic-consistent learning framework to ameliorate the independent training pipelines of visual grounding and image captioning. The proposed framework (1) allows the semi-weakly supervised training of visual grounding; (2) improves the performance of fully supervised visual grounding; (3) yields a general captioning model that can describe arbitrary image regions. Extensive experiments show that our fully supervised grounding model achieves state-of-the-art performance, and the semi-weakly supervised one also exhibits competitive performance compared to the fully supervised counterparts. Our image captioning model has the capability to freely describe image regions and meanwhile shows impressive performance on prevalent captioning benchmarks.
Pre-trained Trojan Attacks for Visual Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Pre-trained vision models (PVMs) have become a dominant component due to their exceptional performance when fine-tuned for downstream tasks. However, the presence of backdoors within PVMs poses significant threats. Unfortunately, existing studies primarily focus on backdooring PVMs for the classification task, neglecting potential inherited backdoors in downstream tasks such as detection and segmentation. In this paper, we propose the Pre-trained Trojan attack, which embeds backdoors into a PVM, enabling attacks across various downstream vision tasks. We highlight the challenges posed by cross-task activation and shortcut connections in successful backdoor attacks. To achieve effective trigger activation in diverse tasks, we stylize the backdoor trigger patterns with class-specific textures, enhancing the recognition of task-irrelevant low-level features associated with the target class in the trigger pattern. Moreover, we address the issue of shortcut connections by introducing a context-free learning pipeline for poison training. In this approach, triggers without contextual backgrounds are directly utilized as training data, diverging from the conventional use of clean images. Consequently, we establish a direct shortcut from the trigger to the target class, mitigating the shortcut connection issue. We conducted extensive experiments to thoroughly validate the effectiveness of our attacks on downstream detection and segmentation tasks. Additionally, we showcase the potential of our approach in more practical scenarios, including large vision models and 3D object detection in autonomous driving. This paper aims to raise awareness of the potential threats associated with applying PVMs in practical scenarios. Our codes will be available upon paper publication.
Scale Optimization Using Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for Object Detection on Drone Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Object detection in aerial imagery presents a significant challenge due to large scale variations among objects. This paper proposes an evolutionary reinforcement learning agent, integrated within a coarse-to-fine object detection framework, to optimize the scale for more effective detection of objects in such images. Specifically, a set of patches potentially containing objects are first generated. A set of rewards measuring the localization accuracy, the accuracy of predicted labels, and the scale consistency among nearby patches are designed in the agent to guide the scale optimization. The proposed scale-consistency reward ensures similar scales for neighboring objects of the same category. Furthermore, a spatial-semantic attention mechanism is designed to exploit the spatial semantic relations between patches. The agent employs the proximal policy optimization strategy in conjunction with the evolutionary strategy, effectively utilizing both the current patch status and historical experience embedded in the agent. The proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets for object detection on drone imagery. It significantly outperforms all the compared methods.
Regularized PolyKervNets: Optimizing Expressiveness and Efficiency for Private Inference in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Private computation of nonlinear functions, such as Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) and max-pooling operations, in deep neural networks (DNNs) poses significant challenges in terms of storage, bandwidth, and time consumption. To address these challenges, there has been a growing interest in utilizing privacy-preserving techniques that leverage polynomial activation functions and kernelized convolutions as alternatives to traditional ReLUs. However, these alternative approaches often suffer from a trade-off between achieving faster private inference (PI) and sacrificing model accuracy. In particular, when applied to much deeper networks, these methods encounter training instabilities, leading to issues like exploding gradients (resulting in NaNs) or suboptimal approximations. In this study, we focus on PolyKervNets, a technique known for offering improved dynamic approximations in smaller networks but still facing instabilities in larger and more complex networks. Our primary objective is to empirically explore optimization-based training recipes to enhance the performance of PolyKervNets in larger networks. By doing so, we aim to potentially eliminate the need for traditional nonlinear activation functions, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in privacy-preserving deep neural network architectures. Code can be found on GitHub at: \url{https://github.com/tolusophy/PolyKervNets/}
A Security Enhanced Authentication Protocol
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Internet of Things (IoT) have gained popularity in recent times. With an increase in the number of IoT devices, security and privacy vulnerabilities are also increasing. For sensitive domains like healthcare and industrial sectors, such vulnerabilities can cause havoc. Thus, authentication is an important aspect for establishing a secure communication between various participants. In this paper, we study the two recent authentication and key exchange protocols. We prove that these protocols are vulnerable to replay attack and modification attack, and also suffer from technical correctness. We then present the possible improvements to overcome the discussed vulnerabilities. The enhancement preserves performance of the original protocols.
Human101: Training 100+FPS Human Gaussians in 100s from 1 View
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Reconstructing the human body from single-view videos plays a pivotal role in the virtual reality domain. One prevalent application scenario necessitates the rapid reconstruction of high-fidelity 3D digital humans while simultaneously ensuring real-time rendering and interaction. Existing methods often struggle to fulfill both requirements. In this paper, we introduce Human101, a novel framework adept at producing high-fidelity dynamic 3D human reconstructions from 1-view videos by training 3D Gaussians in 100 seconds and rendering in 100+ FPS. Our method leverages the strengths of 3D Gaussian Splatting, which provides an explicit and efficient representation of 3D humans. Standing apart from prior NeRF-based pipelines, Human101 ingeniously applies a Human-centric Forward Gaussian Animation method to deform the parameters of 3D Gaussians, thereby enhancing rendering speed (i.e., rendering 1024-resolution images at an impressive 60+ FPS and rendering 512-resolution images at 100+ FPS). Experimental results indicate that our approach substantially eclipses current methods, clocking up to a 10 times surge in frames per second and delivering comparable or superior rendering quality. Code and demos will be released at https://github.com/longxiang-ai/Human101.
Hardware-Aware DNN Compression via Diverse Pruning and Mixed-Precision Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown significant advantages in a wide variety of domains. However, DNNs are becoming computationally intensive and energy hungry at an exponential pace, while at the same time, there is a vast demand for running sophisticated DNN-based services on resource constrained embedded devices. In this paper, we target energy-efficient inference on embedded DNN accelerators. To that end, we propose an automated framework to compress DNNs in a hardware-aware manner by jointly employing pruning and quantization. We explore, for the first time, per-layer fine- and coarse-grained pruning, in the same DNN architecture, in addition to low bit-width mixed-precision quantization for weights and activations. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used to explore the associated design space and identify the pruning-quantization configuration so that the energy consumption is minimized whilst the prediction accuracy loss is retained at acceptable levels. Using our novel composite RL agent we are able to extract energy-efficient solutions without requiring retraining and/or fine tuning. Our extensive experimental evaluation over widely used DNNs and the CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets demonstrates that our framework achieves $39\%$ average energy reduction for $1.7\%$ average accuracy loss and outperforms significantly the state-of-the-art approaches.
A Spigot-Algorithm for Square-Roots: Explained and Extended
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2023
Year: 2023

This work presents and extends a known spigot-algorithm for computing square-roots, digit-by-digit, that is suitable for calculation by hand or an abacus, using only addition and subtraction. We offer an elementary proof of correctness for the original algorithm, then present a corresponding spigot-algorithm for computing cube-roots. Finally, we generalize the algorithm, so as to find $r$-th roots, and show how to optimize the algorithm for any $r$. The resulting algorithms require only integer addition and subtraction.